John Dies at the End - If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe E-Book

Jason Pargin

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 657

Beschreibung

The New York Times-bestselling John Dies at the End series continues with another terrifying and hilarious tale of Armageddon and the three hopeless heroes standing in its way.I want you to stop what you're doing and ask yourself an important question: If some dark, powerful entity was attempting to ensnare your mind and dominate your will, would you even notice?A competent devil would know that if he revealed his true nature, you'd resist, or seek help. The ideal possession would be more subtle; to you, it would feel like it was your choice. The takeover of your soul would be soothing, satisfying, maybe even kind of fun. An entity armed with such techniques would ensnare millions before anyone caught on.In possibly related news, Dave, John and Amy hear from a panicked mother that a popular toy and its connected smartphone app are demanding flesh from her daughter. Around the world, other owners of the toy are reporting the same. Who, or what, is behind it? What's their endgame? And why does this mother seem to be harboring dark secrets about her family's past?As these three barely-employed amateurs dig for the truth under layers of high-tech occult manipulation and subterfuge, another crucial question lingers: Is there seriously no one else who can handle this?

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Before We Begin The Story, Please Contact The Author if you are Interested in Purchasing any of The Following Items:

A Note to the Rossman Family Regarding Reimbursement for their Cooler

Saturday, August 20, 3:33 a.m.

Saturday, August 20, 6:36 p.m.

Saturday, August 20, 8:28 p.m.

Sunday, August 21, 9:49 a.m.

Sunday, August 21, 10:01 a.m.

John

Amy

Sunday, August 21, 1:31 p.m.

John

Me

Amy

John

Amy

Me

John

Me

An Excerpt from “Projections into the Void”, by Dr. Albert Marconi

Sunday, August 21, 8:58 p.m.

John

Amy

Sunday, August 21, 9:39 p.m.

John

Me

John

Me

John

Me

Monday, August 22, 2:22 a.m.

Monday, August 22, 4:34 a.m.

Me

John

Book II

An Excerpt from “Projections into the Void”, by Dr. Albert Marconi

Monday, August 22, 10:01 a.m.

John

Me

John

Me

Monday, August 22, 2:02 p.m.

Monday, August 22, 5:35 p.m.

Monday, August 22, 5:55 p.m.

Me

John

Me

John

Me

Amy

Monday, August 22, 7:37 p.m.

?, ?, ?

Monday, August 22, 8:08 p.m.

Tuesday, August 23, 12:21 a.m.

?, ?, ?

Monday, August 22, 8:08 p.m.

Amy

Me

Monday, August 22, 11:11 p.m.

Me

John

Me

Monday, July 4, 2:12 p.m.

Monday, July 11, 8:48 a.m.

Wednesday, July 13, 10:10 p.m.

The New Commandments of the Simurai: A Trinity of Trinities

Afterword

Also by Jason Pargin, writing as David Wong,and available from Titan Books

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders:

Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

The Zoey Ashe series

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

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If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360119

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803362724

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Jason Pargin 2022

Jason Pargin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Ginger the Dog, who is nowbarking at the garbage trucks in Heaven

BEFORE WE BEGIN THE STORY, PLEASE CONTACTTHE AUTHOR IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PURCHASINGANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS:

* A Haunted and/or Cursed Glass Patio Table

In good condition, the haunting/curse can be mitigated with any common tablecloth. It doesn’t make a noise or anything, but the reflection in the glass is delayed by exactly twenty-four hours. For example, this morning I sat and ate cereal while staring at my phone, but in the reflection, I saw myself as I was at that time yesterday (eating cereal and staring at my phone while wearing a slightly cleaner version of this shirt). This can have unexpected consequences; the previous owner was a woman whose brunch was once disrupted by the sight of another woman’s ass pressed against the surface from the other side. Specifically, it was the ass of the owner’s young housekeeper, rocking back and forth in the act of lovemaking. The sex partner, the reflection revealed, was the table owner’s husband. The glass is very strong; the previous owner tried to shatter it with a baseball bat, a brick, and a Range Rover, none of which left a scratch. One leg is a little shorter than the rest, so it does wobble, but you can stick a matchbook down there or something.

PRICE: $75 OBO

* An Autobiography of Ernest Hemingway Entitled A Congenital Liar That Appears to Be from an Alternate Dimension

Copyrighted 1973, twelve years after the man died in our universe. WARNING: It’s kind of boring and also makes the author sound like a real dick.

PRICE: $5 OBO

* A DVD Box Set of a Ken Burns Documentary About a 1978 Mission to the Moon to Recover the Corpses of the Apollo 11 Astronauts

Also from an alternate dimension, I guess; also boring. Disc 4 has some scratches and may not play in your machine.

PRICE: $10 OBO

* A Growing Chinchilla Coat

As in, the fur continues to grow. My friend John wore it for a while, says it is very warm, but he got tired of having to trim it every week.

PRICE: $50 OBO

* A Rare (?) Copy of Purity Warrior Magazine

The June 2011 issue, again appears to be from another reality or whatever. The cover depicts victims being crucified in front of a strip club under the headline, “The Consecration of New Orleans”; includes articles on how to detect and report sins committed by your neighbor (“Fornicators will frequently refuse eye contact and wear dark clothing”) and a list of ways to punish a child who has befriended a heretic (“#4. Simulate the fires of Hell by pressing a heated clothes iron against their most sensitive patch of skin!”). It’s all pretty gross, but the ads are hilarious.

PRICE: $3 OBO

* A “Cursed” PlayStation 2 Console

Causes all characters in all games to appear nude aside from their shoes and socks. Includes copies of Madden NFL 2005, Wild Arms 4, and Summer Heat Beach Volleyball. NOTE: Has not been tested with any games other than those, so I guess it’s possible the console is normal and only those three games are cursed.

PRICE: $25 OBO, games included. No memory card.

* 62 Supposedly Haunted/Possessed/Cursed Dolls of Various Types and Sizes

Call for pricing and details.

* A “Cursed” Camera

An early-2000s Canon Rebel. Does not function as a regular camera. The previous owner claimed when she used it to photograph her home, the house in the photos was much larger, with new siding and neat hedges. When her husband used it to photograph his Toyota Corolla, the photo displayed it as a cocaine-white 1980s-era Lamborghini Countach. When I tried to test the camera by taking a mirror selfie with it, I saw only a normal photo of myself, but with a much larger penis. That must have broken the curse, because the camera now only produces that exact photo no matter who is using it (my girlfriend, Amy, and my friend John both tried it).

PRICE: $5 OBO

[Contact info redacted]

And now, we begin our tale . . .Wait, one more thing:

A NOTE TO THE ROSSMAN FAMILY REGARDINGREIMBURSEMENT FOR THEIR COOLER

“This is really about my wife,” said the man with the parasite gnawing on his skull. “I’ll let her explain.”

He nodded to the chair next to him, where absolutely no one was sitting, then waited in silence like he was letting his “wife” speak. John, Amy, and I exchanged glances, none of us quite sure what to do.

The man appeared to be in his early fifties and had the kind of sad, droopy features that made him look like God hadn’t finished inflating him. He had shown up at my apartment two minutes ago saying he’d been dropped off by the police, who apparently hadn’t stuck around to explain. He was now sitting at my kitchen table with me, Amy, and the empty chair, John leaning on the counter and fidgeting with the red, white, and blue novelty cowboy hat in his hands.

The guy was now looking at us expectantly, like he was waiting for us to reply to whatever his invisible wife had just said. The parasite made soft grinding noises like an inmate surreptitiously sawing through prison bars. It was chewing away more of his skull, I guess—it had already made quite a hole up there. The parasite, or whatever word you’d use to describe the creature attached to the dude’s head, had a body about the size of two fists, its sleek carapace a vivid purple. It had six long, black segmented legs, covered in bristles. It kind of looked like somebody had glued half a dozen fat centipedes to one of Prince’s codpieces. The creature’s legs were wrapped tightly around the man’s face, one running under his nose like a mustache. Around its purple body was a ring of several eyes that twitched back and forth as if scanning the room, each moving and blinking at different intervals. Under the creature, I could see a sliver of the man’s exposed, pink brain, surrounded by blood-matted hair. The victim seemed to not feel this at all and in general was clearly unaware of the creature’s presence.

Amy finally broke the silence, bless her. “I’m sorry, can you explain why the police brought you here, again?”

The “here” she referred to was our apartment, which was small enough that the table we were sitting around overlapped the borders of the kitchenette, dining room, and living room. In general, I’m not sure either we or the apartment made for a reassuring first impression. Only two of the four kitchen chairs matched. Behind me, a window air conditioner was making a noise like it was being dragged down a gravel road. John was in the process of placing his garish American flag cowboy hat back atop his head; his outfit included a T-shirt featuring a photo of himself in which he was wearing the same hat and T-shirt he wore in real life. So the John in the photo was wearing a shirt featuring John wearing the photo of John wearing that shirt created a recursion that presumably continued for infinity. Below it was a pair of denim shorts that were too small. Much too small.

“Weren’t you listening?” said the guy, suddenly exasperated. “Why does nobody listen? Eve and I went out to eat lunch at Loew’s Steaks. The place was packed, because of the Fourth. We waited for an hour for a table. I sit down, we both order, the waitress brings my food but nothing for Eve. We ask politely what’s going on with her order, and the bitch talks to me and just ignores Eve completely. I demanded to talk to a manager. He comes over and does the same, won’t even look at her. Right, honey?”

He glanced to the empty chair, then nodded in confirmation.

“Right,” he continued. “So, at this point, I’ll admit I got a little agitated. Some words were exchanged. Long story short, the cops come, smirking at us while we try to tell the story. Like they think it’s funny. They take us to the hospital for some damned reason; that was a total waste of time. I talk to a doctor and the doctor turns around and calls the cops again. Nobody will give me a straight answer, like everybody’s in on the joke but us. The cops finally bring me here and tell me to do whatever you say. They actually giggled as they drove off. I thought they were taking me to the loony bin . . .”

He trailed off as he glanced around at the apartment, scrutinizing it, now doing the exact same thing the purple creature on his head had seemingly done a moment ago: sizing us up. The man noted the centerpiece on the kitchen table, a glass sphere in a brass frame with a floating severed finger inside it. The finger was pointed right back at him, wobbling slightly as it hovered in the center. He then looked toward the counter, where there was a rusty iron box about the size of a human head, with a ragged hole where something had clawed its way out. Next to it was an oversize glass jar, half-full of crinkled dollar bills with a masking tape label that said:

“I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS” JAR

“Who are you people?”

I said, “Oh, that’s John. This is Amy. My name is David. We, uh . . .”

“We work with the police sometimes,” finished Amy. Well, that was definitely one way to put it.

The man seemed skeptical. It probably didn’t help that I was wearing a T-shirt bearing a crudely drawn Stars and Stripes behind the words THIS FLAG NEVER FLAGS in a bombastic font (John had found it at a garage sale). Amy was holding a white straw hat and pink sunglasses in her lap, securing them with her right hand. She wasn’t holding anything in her left because it didn’t exist—that arm ended in a stump at the wrist. Old car accident. She was wearing so much sunscreen that the sweet chemical coconut stink was giving me a headache. When this guy had arrived, we had been on the way out to get a spot for the fireworks at the lake, and Amy knew she had to go in prepared, having descended from a tribe of freckled redheads in some sunless part of the world.

The parasite squeezed its legs around our visitor’s head, digging furrows into his cheeks. I knew from experience that none of the parties involved in this incident—this guy, the cops, the doctors, the steak house waitstaff—had been able to see the little purple monster.

John lifted his patriotic Stetson and ran his hand through his hair, which at the moment was long enough to tickle his shoulders. “Let’s back up,” he said, replacing the hat. “Now, your name is . . .”

“Lou. This is Eve, like I said.”

John glanced at the empty chair. “Sure. Uh, can I get you something to drink? Dave, what do we have?”

“Hmm, well, we have the beers out in the cooler in the van. In here we have, uh, tap water that kind of tastes like it came out of a squirt gun, some warm cans of the Walmart Dr. Pepper knockoff, Dr. Thunder, a bottle of 1985 vintage Austrian wine, and two cases of that Dan Aykroyd Crystal Head vodka—”

“Am I free to go?” asked Lou, somehow ignoring this amazing offer. “Why is everybody treating me like I got caught with a damned dirty bomb at the Vatican? It was a ruckus at a restaurant. Who cares? No punches got thrown. Or none that connected, anyhow. I don’t know what’s happening here.”

“Is it okay if we ask a few questions?” asked Amy. “How long have you and Eve been together?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“Please, this will only take a minute. We are actually here to help.”

I was sure Amy believed that, but it seemed clear to me that regardless of what we did, this dude was already dead.

“Been with her about five months. Married for two. It’s not official; got somebody local to do the ceremony back in May. So what?”

“And this problem, people acting like they don’t want to acknowledge Eve, is this the first time it’s happened? And if not, when did it start?”

Instead of answering, the man deferred to the empty chair, like his wife was answering instead.

When she’d apparently finished, he said, “I’ll take her word for it. My memory’s not so good these days. Chemo messes with your brain cells. But like she said, she doesn’t go out much. Got the agoraphobia, on top of her disability. Doesn’t like crowds. But I told her weeks ago, we’re going out for the Fourth, so get yourself right in the head. Do whatever you’ve got to do, because we’re going out in public and we’re gonna enjoy the holiday. That’s no way for somebody to live, cooped up like that.”

I asked, “What was her response?”

“Just what I’d expected. She pitched a fit. I waited for it to blow over and told her this was what we were doing, if I had to carry her out of the house.” He smiled at the empty chair. “She eventually came around.”

I found myself staring at the parasite and realized it was making eye contact with me with about three of its eyes. It’s entirely possible that up to that moment, it thought it was as invisible to me as it was to everyone else, and now knew otherwise.

What is your game here? I thought to myself, not entirely sure the parasite couldn’t hear it.

I’ve been calling the creature a “parasite” because 1) half of all known living creatures are parasites, so that’s always a fairly safe guess, and 2) it was allowing this guy to continue walking around and functioning as normal while it fed on him. That’s what parasites do: climb on and leave the host healthy enough to do the hunting and gathering and fighting. It’s a sound strategy if you can pull it off. As for why it would make him hallucinate a wife, I wasn’t sure but also didn’t particularly care.

I glanced down at my phone to check the time. We needed to get going; the good sitting spots around the lake would fill up fast (under the trees, where Amy wouldn’t get roasted alive). I’m sorry if this seems cold, but it’s not like this guy is the only one walking around with an interdimensional parasite leaching off his system. You’ve probably met somebody in that very situation in the last month. Hell, some of the people reading this are in that situation. Have you ever found yourself obsessively watching a TV show you don’t actually enjoy? That probably means you’re just watching your parasite’s favorite show.

John said, “I want to try something, if that’s okay.” He dug into his front pocket and pulled out a quarter. He addressed the empty chair where “Eve” was supposedly sitting and said, “I’m going to toss this quarter to you. I want you to catch it and toss it back to me.”

Lou immediately looked outraged. “I’m sorry, is that some kind of sick joke?”

“It’s just a test. It will only take a moment.”

“How do you expect her to catch it?” shouted Lou. “Look at her. You can clearly see that her arms don’t work. Got the nerve damage, on account of her disorder.”

John dropped the coin to the table and sighed, defeated. He glanced at me with a look that said it all: This is one of the few days of the year when this town’s collective day drinking isn’t considered a tragedy, and we’re missing it.

To Lou, I said, “This may seem like another odd question, but do you get headaches?”

“No,” he replied over the gravelly rasp of the parasite munching on his cranium. “Why would I get headaches?”

John suddenly got that alarming look he gets when he thinks he has an idea, then positioned himself behind the empty chair and said, “All right, let me try this. Just stay where you are, Eve. Are you ready? Here we go.”

John pulled the chair away from the table, then picked up and lifted it above his head.

“Whoa!” said John. “Look at that. I’m the world’s strongest man, apparently, because I just lifted your wife above my head like it was nothing.”

“Are you out of your mind?” barked Lou. “She’s standing right there. What’s going on here? Am I being filmed? Is this a prank?”

I said, “I’m sorry. You’ve caught us at a bad time. We were just about to head to the lake to do that thing where we celebrate America’s birthday by terrifying all of its dogs, so we’ve not been able to go through our normal meticulous process for evaluating a situation like yours. We’re not trying to be rude, we’re really not, but we have a narrow window in which I can get just drunk enough to not care that nobody has invented any new fireworks for the last thousand years.”

“Then let us go,” said Lou. “Hell, that’s where we were headed. We were going to head out after we’d eaten. So why are we here?”

I looked pleadingly toward Amy and then John, silently soliciting ideas. Normally, the ideas were Amy’s department, but she likely couldn’t see the parasite and so probably didn’t understand what exactly we were dealing with. John probably could see it, but I think he was out of ideas after the chair thing.

I sighed and said, “Look, I’m just going to rip off the Band-Aid. What if I told you that the reason people aren’t interacting with your wife is because she doesn’t exist?”

Amy recoiled. Usually we would try to use a little more finesse with this kind of thing, but, hey, you get what you pay for.

Lou smirked. “Now I know there are cameras recording this. Where are they? Is this for YouTube or TV? What, you get everybody together to work out some elaborate prank, and then I win a Hooters gift card at the end?”

Amy said, “He’s telling you the truth. There are exactly four people in this room. Well, let me clarify—David said that Eve doesn’t exist; I should say that none of us can perceive her. She’s real to you, that’s clear, but it appears she’s only real to you.”

“How—”

“You have a, uh, condition,” I said. “There’s no easy way to explain it, but it appears, from where I sit, that it’s eventually going to kill you. Though none of us here are doctors, obviously. If you want to leave, we won’t stop you. But something will have to be done about it at some point.”

John said, “There’s a chance you could become a danger to other people.”

Lou scoffed, then grabbed a patch of air and held it, like he’d put his hand on his invisible wife’s forearm.

“You hear that, babe? You don’t exist! I’ll have to remember that at tax time.”

John said, “I don’t know how to explain your, uh, condition because I don’t know what you’re ready to believe. So let me just put it like this: There’s an invisible parasitic creature, probably from another dimension, chewing on your skull. It is apparently making you hallucinate Eve in order to manipulate you. Dave and I can see it, but no one else can, for reasons that would take forever to explain. But any parasite’s strategy is going to start with going undetected. The exact way it’s hiding itself and preventing you from feeling the huge hole in your skull isn’t really important in the long run, is it? Oh, right, it has also chewed a huge hole in your skull.”

Lou stood, forcing a laugh. “You people are nuts. Come on, honey.” He turned as if to go, then stopped and looked down at the empty chair. “What do you mean? That doesn’t even—”

He became still, then sat down again.

“But,” he began, then stopped as if he’d been sharply told to shut up and listen for once in his damned life.

After a couple of minutes of this, he said, “Can you three step outside? We need to talk in private.”

It was my home, so it didn’t seem right that we had to go stand in the sun while he had his private conversation, but now didn’t seem like the time to press the issue. We went out onto the landing of the rusty exterior stairway/bird toilet that led up to my second-floor apartment. When we closed the door behind us, Lou and “Eve” were already having a passionate heart-to-heart.

I raised my hand and said, “Who else votes that we just leave and go watch the fireworks?”

Ignoring this, Amy asked, “Exactly what are you guys seeing?”

“He’s got a creature on his head, sucking on his brain.”

John added, “It kind of looks like a robot crab wearing a purple bicycle helmet.”

Amy closed her eyes and let out a breath. We’d seen people in similar situations before, and if there’s a cure, we never came close to finding it. You pull the parasite off and the guy’s brain comes out with it. A team of a dozen of the world’s best neurosurgeons could maybe do something if they actually possessed the ability to see the creature or the wound, which they almost certainly wouldn’t. There was no need for the three of us to say any of that out loud.

“You don’t see it at all?”

Amy shook her head. “I can sense something is there but can’t make it out.”

If given enough time, she probably could. It was a skill one could acquire with practice, the way mechanics can tell what repairs your car needs just by looking at how expensive your shoes are. Seeing these entities had nothing to do with the anatomy of the human eye and everything to do with how the mind chooses to store memories—you might see it, but won’t remember seeing it, even while you’re actively looking at it. If you find that hard to grasp, keep in mind you’ve forgotten 99.99 percent of your life up to this point. Can you remember the face of a single cashier you’ve ever interacted with?

“So,” I said, “which of the three options do we want to go with here?”

Again, I didn’t need to state the three options, because they never changed: We could A) let the guy go, B) painlessly kill him and then try to somehow kill the parasite (and these creatures could be very hard to kill), or C) make some token effort to remove the thing and see if, by some miracle, Lou survived. If that last one is your knee-jerk answer, that just means you’re new to this. Knowing that there’s a near-zero chance he survives, wouldn’t it be better to sneak up from behind and quickly put him out of his misery, instead of making the poor bastard spend his final hours strapped to my bed while we tried to wrestle an invisible monster off his face? And please note that when threatened, these creatures can do very nasty things to a human body and even nastier things to the mind, if not the soul.

Amy said, “He seems to be physically healthy at the moment, so we have some time to figure out what we can do for him. We could get an expert on the phone. Maybe Dr. Marconi is around, maybe he knows somebody . . . I don’t know. As long as there’s life, there’s a chance.”

“She’s right,” I said. “We should tell this guy to go home and stay by the phone until we can figure out what’s going on. In the meantime, we can go get drunk and watch fireworks, blow some shit up, eat some hot dogs. When we get up tomorrow afternoon, Amy can find some kind of freaky doctor or veterinarian who knows how to work on patients like this, and if not, we can always kill him then.”

John shook his head, oscillating his patriotic hat in the process. “Nah, we can’t let the guy run around free with that thing controlling him. Did you see its eyes? It was listening the whole time; it knows we’re onto it. Hell, it may be able to hear us out here, for all we know. What if we send him home and ‘Eve’ instructs him to go on a shooting spree? Or makes him build a little catapult to fling his own turds at a crowded playground?”

“Right,” said Amy. “We have to keep him here, or somewhere, and keep an eye on him. You know what? You guys go watch the fireworks; I’ll stay here and babysit Lou and try to contact somebody. It’s fine, the Fourth always stops being fun once I’m the only non-drunk adult around anyway.”

“I’m obviously not leaving you here,” I replied. “If you’re staying, I’m staying.”

John said, “You’re both assuming this guy’s just going to hang out while you try to get on the phone with a . . . surgical exorcist, I guess? One who’s working on the Fourth of July? So a surgical exorcist who hates America. The guy is going to demand you let him go, and at that point, you’ll either have to let him become a public health hazard or shoot him.”

“I don’t want you shooting anybody today,” said Amy, “even if solving a complicated problem by shooting it is just about the most American thing I can imagine. We have to get the guy to stay willingly.”

“And since the parasite is controlling him,” I said, “you mean we have to get the guy to stay willingly in a way that somehow won’t alert the parasite that we’re just stalling until we can get somebody to remove it.”

John considered this, then said, “I wish we had a tranquilizer dart, something like that. Just knock the guy out.”

“There’s actually no such thing as a human tranquilizer dart,” said Amy. “Same with knockout gas. It’s only in movies; otherwise, police would use it all the time. What we could do is—”

There was a noise from inside the apartment, something falling hard to the floor. Then an interior door slammed shut. All our eyes snapped in that direction.

I muttered, “Get the shotgun.”

We’d taken it out to the van earlier (we have a Fourth of July tradition where we soak bags of flour in gasoline, light them, and then blow them apart with buckshot). John ran down and returned with the shotgun a moment later, checking that there was a shell loaded into each of its five barrels. It was a custom item he’d just bought off the internet, and it had, to our knowledge, never been fired. But it had to have been of good quality; otherwise, the maker wouldn’t have charged a whole forty-seven dollars for it.

If I leaned out over the landing, I could peer into the nearest window a little and get a look inside. I saw one chair knocked over at the kitchen table, but no sign of Lou. I scanned the floor to see if Eve had detached and was maybe skittering around in there, looking for another brain to munch. I could detect no movement, but noticed the bedroom door was closed.

I made a hand signal to John to try to convey all of this, and he nodded as if he understood me. He readied the shotgun, checking that both bayonets were firmly attached. I threw the door open and then stepped aside. John went in, scanning the room with the five laser pointers that had been duct-taped to the barrels. Amy and I followed him in and, finding the kitchen/dining room/living room empty, the three of us advanced to the closed bedroom door. There was a thump, and the floor shook, like something heavy slammed against the wall. From behind the door came the sounds of rustling and a low, animalistic grunt, like someone or something struggling against their own body.

I held up three fingers to signal a countdown.

Three. Two. One.

I threw the bedroom door open. We all jumped inside, then froze.

Lou was completely nude, lying on our bed and frantically stabbing the air with his erection. His hands were groping the air above him, squeezing breasts that weren’t there. Making passionate love to a woman only he could see.

The three of us stood in the doorway in silence—it was clear Lou either did not know we had entered or was too distracted to care—then we slowly backed out and closed the door. We all sat down at the kitchen table without saying a word. We stayed there for the next thirty minutes, occasional howls of ecstasy filling the tiny apartment.

Finally, Lou emerged, looking sheepish, now clothed but still wearing the purple parasite like a jaunty hat. “I’m so sorry about that,” he said. “We got to talking and realized that we may never get another chance. We, uh, cleaned up as best we could.”

Well, I thought, at least I won’t feel bad about killing him now.

He sat down at the table and started to pull out a chair for Eve, then silently slid it back into place. “She, well, she explained everything to me.”

I made eye contact with the parasite. “She, as in, your wife?”

“Yeah. Eve, or the thing that created her in my head . . . whatever or whoever is speaking through her, we talked it out. I know Eve isn’t real. Or she isn’t real in the way you would think of it. I know the chair is empty, I guess is what I mean. She said you guys spotted her, and she doesn’t want to keep up the charade.”

“So,” I began, having been truly thrown for a loop by this, “you know you have a creature sucking on your brain? A purple thing with six legs?”

“Don’t describe it to me. I’d rather not know. She—orit—offered to let me go look in a mirror, saying she would allow me to see her for real. I declined. I’m trying to keep my wits about me, and I don’t think that would happen if I saw the situation as it really was.”

I thought, That’s probably how a lot of marriages are maintained, but didn’t say it.

Amy asked, “Did she explain why she’s doing this? Or what her purpose is?”

“She’s lost,” said Lou. “She wound up in this world but doesn’t know how. She needed a host, so she picked me, because she detected that I wouldn’t resist, not in my state. So she latched on and created this imaginary woman, my dream girl, to keep me pacified. To keep me mostly at home. It must have dug around in my thoughts, figured out what I needed.” He shrugged.

“It was nice of her to come clean about it,” said John. “You don’t usually get that kind of honesty from parasites.”

Lou scoffed. “She said that once she got to know me, she felt guilty about it. And it didn’t work anyway. She’s dying. She can’t survive here. And when she dies, I’ll die. We won’t make it through the night, no matter what anybody does. That’s why she agreed to go out with me today, even though there was no chance it wasn’t going to be a calamity. It’s our last day. Our bodies will shut down, and it’s probably going to be very, very painful, she says. For both of us.”

Amy said, “I’m sorry.”

“Will you help me?” Lou asked Amy, having already identified which of us was likely to give him a yes.

“You just said nothing could be done,” I said, kind of annoyed that this guy couldn’t have had this epiphany on his own, before he screwed up our holiday.

Lou paused in a manner that I now recognized was him letting Eve talk, then said, “We want you to do it for us. If you don’t mind.”

“Do . . . what?” asked Amy. But she already knew.

“We would like this one last evening together. Then we want you to kill us. As painlessly as possible. Maybe a bullet through my head and her . . . it . . . at the same time. You guys have experience with this sort of thing, yes? That’s why the cops brought me here? Afterward, put the gun in my dead hand and leave me wherever. Let everyone think I did it to myself. Everyone already thinks I went crazy, so . . .” He shrugged and wiped a tear from his left eye. The creature scooted one of its segmented legs aside so that he could do it.

I deferred to Amy because this seemed like the kind of plan she would object to.

She said, “I don’t think I can do that,” which I noted wasn’t the same as saying it shouldn’t be done.

John said, “I can do it, if I get a couple of drinks in me.”

“We could do it at the lake,” suggested Lou. “In the woods, out away from the people, where we can still see the fireworks. Do it at the finale, when everything is going off at once, to hide the noise. Eve and I will sit there and hold hands, and we’ll go out together. Or it’ll seem like we’re holding hands, to us. You know what I mean.”

I said, “You don’t have any family or friends around here?”

He shook his head.

I realized it probably sounded like I was asking if he had loved ones who could help guide him through this difficult time, but what I was actually asking was if there was anyone who might raise a stink about the cops not looking too closely into his “suicide” (and they wouldn’t). I didn’t want to do it and then find out the guy’s brother was our congressman or some shit.

Amy asked, “If Eve feels so bad about this, why can’t she just detach herself? It’s obvious that you’re healthy enough to walk and talk, so why not go to the hospital, say goodbye to Eve, and tell the doctors you need them to rebuild that side of your skull? Without her camouflage, the wound will be visible, won’t it?”

“She can’t detach. Her body is merged with my brain and nerves, all that stuff in there. It was the only way she could interact with our world, using my eyes and ears. There’s no separating—we’re one thing now. I’d end it myself, but I don’t think I can bring myself to pull the trigger. Too scared. And I know I sound nuttier with every word I say, but with what I’ve had with her over the last few months . . . I really don’t mind. I haven’t made much of my life, spent most of it high, getting fired from shit jobs. I said earlier that she detected I was too weak to resist the attachment, and what she meant was that I didn’t have much time left regardless. Got cancer, pancreas. But me and her have had such a good time together . . . it’s been a gift, to spend my final months like this. I’m telling you guys, I’m okay with it.”

Amy asked Lou to excuse us and led John and me back out to the landing.

I closed the door behind me and whispered, “This feels like a trap.”

Amy glanced toward the kitchen and said, “How?”

“Maybe this parasite wants us to kill this dude. Maybe that was the whole point. Maybe it spawned a hallucination purely to lead him to this.”

“Why would she need us to do it?” asked John. “Eve can turn the dude’s brain into Sloppy Joe anytime she wants just by doing this.” He twirled his finger around.

“Maybe it’s toying with us. Wants to make us do it, just for the fun of it.”

Amy asked, “So what do you suggest?”

I lowered my voice even more. “Well, for one, it’s irresponsible to take that creature out to the crowded lake. Maybe we get him out there and it jumps off this guy and latches onto somebody else’s head. Maybe that’s its plan.”

“But he’s been living among the public for months. She could have done that at the restaurant, the hospital, the cop car on the way over, anywhere.”

John asked, “You think she’s just telling the truth?”

“Why not? Not everything is an evil scheme.”

I said, “Hold on. Are you now in favor of us taking him to the lake and shooting him in the head?”

“No. I don’t know. How about we take him to the fireworks and let him eat a funnel cake and enjoy the night. While we’re there, we try to talk him out of it. Maybe Eve is wrong, maybe there’s a way to live on. Maybe we can find some kind of solution. I don’t know.”

John said, “I’m fine with that.” He looked at me. “You want to make it unanimous?”

I shrugged. “I’m outvoted either way.”

“The way I figure it, when you’re given multiple choices with no way of knowing which one is right, you just do the easiest—that’s called ‘efficiency.’ In this case, we pick the choice that lets us also go drink and watch fireworks.”

Amy said, “Well, if at the end of the night we may have to, uh, cure this guy, then you probably shouldn’t drink beforehand.”

John adjusted his Stetson and said, “Oh, I’m gonna get drunk as hell.”

*   *   *

We live in a part of the world where everyday citizens can still get genuine “blow your fingers off” fireworks from roadside stands starting around May. The professional fireworks show at the lake would kick off at around 9:00 p.m., but prior to that point, the gathering would feature plenty of increasingly inebriated spectators setting off all sorts of irresponsible explosives that may or may not have been made in a garage. Some didn’t even buy their fireworks; they just got creative with what they had on hand. Last year, a guy filled giant balloons from tanks of oxygen and acetylene from a blowtorch and then detonated them, birthing a huge flash of orange and a deep boom that rolled across the water and echoed off the hills. The year before, an old guy brought a box of white chunks of rock that Amy said must have been pure sodium; he would chuck them into the lake, where they would fizzle and then explode, sending up a geyser like a cannon shot from a pirate ship. Mass gatherings in this town always made for great people-watching, especially if you liked seeing people get loaded into an ambulance.

John parked along a gravel road near the lake, and the four of us hauled lawn chairs and a cooler toward the sound of music and minor explosions. Once we got close enough that the crowd came into view, Lou stopped.

“If it’s okay, we wanna go off on our own,” he said, “maybe deeper into the woods, away from the people.”

Before I could answer, Amy replied, “Okay, we’ll come to check on you,” and kept walking.

John and I stayed where we were. It was bad enough that we were bringing this creature near a crowd of potential victims, but now this guy—if he was even in control of his own brain at all—was wandering off to where he wouldn’t be observed.

I said, “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.”

Lou said, “I want to be able to talk to Eve. My wife. For the last time. Out there, around the people, I’ll just look like I’m crazy. I’ll scare the kids. We’ll stay close to the lake, I promise. I’m not looking to get lost out there and eaten by a coyote.”

We still didn’t move.

He said, “Please. Give me this.”

Amy said, “Come on, guys. We have to get a spot.”

We followed her, as always, and Lou veered off and disappeared into the trees. I was pretty sure that Eve was making eye contact with me the whole way.

The Independence Day revelers were spread out in a grassy field between the lake and the woods, a constellation of picnic blankets and lawn chairs around a huddle of decrepit food stands and carnival games under faded tents. The good shady spots we were hoping for back at the edge of the woods were, in fact, all occupied. We eventually found a couple of John’s friends—Vinnie and his boyfriend, Other Vinnie—who had set up their own shade under a blue tarp and poles. They let us squeeze ourselves in with them in exchange for John sharing some of his weed. Then, within an hour, the couple got into a fistfight over one of the carnival games (it was one of those punch-the-bag-and-measure-your-strength games, and Other Vinnie insisted on clowning Vinnie about getting a lower score), and after they were both hauled off by the cops, we had their tarp to ourselves.

Some part of my brain kept reminding me that we were probably going to have to explode a dude’s head at the end of the night, but, as usual, a few beers helped me get proper perspective on the whole thing. If you think about it, anxiety is also a kind of parasite. And isn’t it unpatriotic to spend America’s birthday distracted by nonsense? Sometimes when life’s Warning Light won’t stop flashing, the best thing you can do is just put some electrician’s tape over it. Every now and then, Amy would get up and go check on Lou and his passenger, each time returning to say that their situation was unchanged.

Once the sun went down and it was clearly getting to be time for the professional fireworks, John leaned over to us and said, “Are we still doing this?”

“I want to talk to them one more time,” said Amy. “I want David to come with me; maybe we can tag-team it.”

“To accomplish what?” I asked. “To try to convince the guy that it’s better to die horribly than to get quickly snuffed out while cuddling his imaginary wife? I don’t think I’m going to be much help, even though I don’t particularly want to do the shooting.”

Instead of replying, Amy gave me a hard look that yanked me to my feet. I followed her to a poorly maintained trail through the woods, a path booby-trapped with dangling branches and broken beer bottles. It was just getting dark around the lake, but in the dense woods, it was already midnight. Amy plunged ahead like she knew the path, so I followed, though neither of us had flashlights and the drunken ground was tilting beneath my feet. I stomped through dead leaves and nearly tripped over exposed roots. Bugs buzzed around my ears. I lost all sense of direction. The pops and thuds from the lake behind me made me feel like we were fleeing a war zone.

The wilderness is stupid and should be burned to the ground.

There was a moment when I wasn’t sure if I was even on the trail anymore, and I imagined my emaciated corpse getting found out here weeks from now, wild animals having chewed out my eyes and genitals. Then everything lit up red around me. It was the first of the main fireworks going off, a burst of hellfire in the sky followed by the thump of detonation a moment later, the sound trailing the light. In that moment of illumination, I saw movement up ahead.

Amy, on the ground.

Flailing limbs. Grunts. Heavy breathing.

The firework faded, and I rushed ahead blindly, the flash having robbed me of my night vision. A dangling branch raked across my forehead, drawing blood. There was another sunburst, a white light that illuminated a clearing in the woods. I saw Amy kneeling over Lou, who was thrashing around in the leaves.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Are you okay?”

“He’s having a seizure!”

As I arrived at the spot, another explosion in the sky revealed the man’s rolled-back eyes and foam oozing from his mouth.

“Do we, like, shove a wallet or something between his teeth?”

“No, no. You don’t do anything for a seizure except make sure they don’t hurt themselves. He landed on top of a beer bottle, but I got it out from under him. You just have to let it run its course.”

This was fortunate, because I happen to have an advanced certificate in hanging back and letting things run their course. After about a minute of thrashing, Lou went still. I thought he was dead for a blissful moment, but then he blinked and sat up, like he was surprised to be there. A prolonged burst overhead like the explosion of the Death Star illuminated the clearing, and I got a glimpse of the parasite. Eve appeared dried out, somehow. There were little cracks on its carapace, one of its eyes had closed, and one of its segmented legs was dangling free, like it no longer had the strength to hang on. It seemed like Eve had been telling the truth: It was dying.

Lou caught his breath and finally noted our presence. “I’m okay,” he grunted. “Well, I’m not okay; I can’t stand up. Whatever part of my brain kept my balance has checked out for good. My left arm’s gone numb. Eve says she’s holding on as long as she can, but time is running out. She tells me it’s like a person trying to survive on a planet where the atmosphere is poison. She keeps apologizing. She’s crying right now, seeing what she’s done to me.” He waved his hand in front of his right eye. “Think I’m starting to go blind, too. She said that would happen. It’s okay, honey. It really is. We’re in this together.”

Amy said, “Let us take you to a hospital. There may be experts in this kind of thing, maybe somebody knows how to—”

“If I’d wanted that,” he interrupted with a dismissive wave, “I’d have asked you to take me there myself. What’s the best that could happen? They turn me into a vegetable to run up a million bucks in medical debt until the cancer eats me alive? Look, if you don’t wanna do it, leave me the gun. I’ll try to do it myself. I’d just ask that if I mess it up, you finish the job. On both of us. Eve is suffering, too. More than me, I think, though she tries not to let on.”

I said, “No, we’ll do it.”

A fresh flash of orange lit up the scene, the pop arriving a second later. That delay always freaked me out as a kid, like time was broken, the signal of reality out of sync.

“Wait until the finale, like I said—” Lou stopped to attend to something Eve was saying, then grinned broadly. “She’s never seen fireworks before. She’s loving it, even through the pain.”

I dug out my phone and texted John.

hey get the shotgun we need to shoot this dude

After a minute he replied,

k be there in a sec

About ten minutes later, a flashlight beam stabbed its way through the trees, and then John stepped into the clearing with the shotgun. I asked Amy if she wanted to stay for this part. She didn’t answer, but also didn’t leave. I mean, she’d definitely seen people die before.

Lou glanced at John, noted the gun, then turned back to watch the fireworks.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if to savor his final air. “This world, it really is beautiful sometimes. Eve said that just now. I agree. I wish I’d stopped to appreciate it more. But that’s okay. It’s all okay. We’re gonna sit here and watch the fireworks, and you do it whenever you’re ready.”

He drew his knees up to his chest. The finale began, the ground crew launching all their remaining arsenal, filling the sky with blooms of magnesium. Amy turned away from Lou. I stepped back. Then John did what I had already suspected he would do: He aimed the shotgun at the parasite, but not directly into Lou’s skull like the man had requested. He angled it exactly how you would if you were trying to blow the parasite free, maybe scraping the guy’s skull with pellets in the process. I know that probably sounds ridiculous, since blowing away the parasite would surely kill the man just as quickly, the thing’s tentacles yanking out brain parts as it flew. But there was a difference between this man dying from our projectiles and dying as a side effect of us killing the creature who’d hijacked him. If you don’t see the difference because the outcome is the same either way, well, see if you feel the same when it’s your finger on the trigger.

John hesitated only for the amount of time it took him to get the aim just right. He fired, and the parasite went flying, leaving a wound in Lou’s skull the size of a grapefruit. The man continued to sit upright for just a moment, before his brains came tumbling out of his skull. His purple, bulbous brains, spilling out and rolling away . . .

Hmm. That doesn’t seem right.

What was falling out of Lou’s skull was a stream of what looked like purple golf balls. Dozens of them, more than what could be contained in a human cranium. His body sank to the ground, but he wasn’t slumping over—hewas deflating. Within seconds, Lou’s entire head just went flat, then his chest and arms and torso followed suit. It was like he contained no bones or musculature, just a sack of skin full of hundreds of those little balls.

No, not balls.

Eggs.

The eruption of fireworks illuminated the spheres rolling past my shoes. They were translucent, and inside each ball was a black, squirming shadow.

Amy jumped back at the sight of them. “Wha—howwas he even walking?”

I started to say something to John, but he wasn’t there anymore. I found him stomping off into the woods, toward the lake.

He said, “She’s getting away!”

“What?”

“Eve’s still alive! She landed and took off through the woods! She’s heading toward the people!”

Looking for a new goddamned host.

Amy and I took off in that direction, blindly trusting that John was even going the right way. I looked back at the spot where Lou had been. He was now just a popped skin balloon, completely flat. It even seemed like his remains were oozing and melting, his clothes deteriorating right along with the rest, like they’d always been a part of him.

Whatthe—?

I wasn’t sure about leaving the eggs behind (if they hatched, who knew when we’d have another normal holiday?), and I was about to ask if I should go back and stomp on them or something. But at that moment, a gunshot rang out, a noise closer and sharper than any of the fireworks. I turned and plunged into the woods toward John—we were not on any kind of trail—and found him aiming at the ground. He apparently hadn’t hit his target, because he took off running again, dodging around tree trunks and leaping over protruding roots. The idiot was going to trip and blow his own head off. I tried to follow, but I was watching him instead of my own feet, and then I was the one who tripped, landing hard and scraping up my hands.

Amy raced past me and said, “Come on!” like I was down there taking a nap. I struggled to my feet and kind of got lost again, but eventually, the lake came into view.

The grand finale of the fireworks was still raging across the sky like an interstellar battle that the combatants intended to win purely on style points. I saw the silhouette of John holding the shotgun, Amy behind him. They were standing right among the seated crowd, a family on one side of them and a row of college-age kids on the other. All eyes were turned upward. Somewhere, a terrified baby was crying, the poor kid probably thinking the world was coming to an end.

I caught up to them and scoured the ground until—

“There!”

Amy was pointing. Eve was up ahead, skittering between a couple of old women in lawn chairs. The fireworks died out overhead, and darkness claimed the lake. I heard drunken applause. John sprinted up with his flashlight and found Eve with the beam—

It was dragging something.

A severed human arm.

Wait, no. It was growing an arm, like it was birthing a fully grown man, one limb at a time. The fingers were wiggling around like they were testing their range of motion, the arm clothed in a dark shirtsleeve. A moment later came a shoulder and a neck, then a bubble of skin appeared, grew hair, and formed itself into a head. The parasite had stopped moving because it was now dragging about 20 percent of a fully grown and fully dressed human and was rapidly trying to birth the rest of it.

The face it had created, its features still only partially formed, turned to look at us and said, “Haha! Your fireworks suck shit!”

Eve, the head, arm, and now part of another arm tried to run away from us, the limbs clumsily slapping the ground along with Eve’s six spindly legs. John waited for the monstrosity to get clear of the nearest group of revelers and then ran up and held the shotgun just inches away from the face Eve had secreted from its underbelly.

He fired. The new head immediately deflated, splattering dark fluid and sputtering like a released balloon. Spectators nearby jumped and turned but mostly seemed annoyed, probably thinking somebody had tossed a cherry bomb among them as a prank. John aimed again, but Eve tore itself free from the partial body it’d tried to spawn and took off through the crowd once more. I pursued the creature, intending to, I guess, punch it to death? I didn’t even have a weapon.

When I had drawn near enough, I dove, snatching Eve with both hands. The parasite thrashed in my grip, the weird hairs on its legs scraping my skin. One leg reached out and wrapped itself around a full can of beer that had rolled into the grass, and then started repeatedly smacking me in the face with it.

“Ow! Fuck!”

From behind me, I heard Amy say, “Excuse me!”

She had grabbed a nearby cooler, dumping its contents onto the grass over the protests of the family sitting nearby. She ran over and held the cooler open. I threw the creature inside. Amy slammed the lid and flung her body on top to hold it shut.

I was aware of people standing all around us now, the owners of the cooler yelling at Amy. Some of the people recognized us, and that did nothing to alleviate their annoyance.

John arrived then, the shotgun resting against his shoulder. “It’s all right. It was a rattlesnake. We’re with animal control. There’s a whole bunch of ’em back there, in the woods. A little kid got bit and had to go to the hospital. We need to commandeer this cooler.”

“Fuck off!” suggested the father of the cooler family. “You’re not with animal control. You’re gonna clean all this up and give me my cooler back.”

“Okay, but there is actually a snake in here,” said Amy. “We’ll bring it right back, I promise. The cooler, not the snake.”

As usual, the bystanders accepted Amy’s reassurances after refusing ours. Pushing the blatant sexism out of my mind, I picked up the cooler and held it against my body, hugging it closed while Eve thrashed around inside. We all headed toward the gravel road, in the direction of where we’d parked the van. We passed the two Vinnies, themselves heading toward where they’d parked their giant pickup, carrying their rolled-up tarp between them. John asked them how they got out of jail so fast, and Other Vinnie said he didn’t know what the hell John was talking about. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. We’d had other things going on.

I shouted ahead to John, “Hey, we have to see about those eggs.”

“I didn’t forget.”

When he reached the van, he retrieved a red plastic gasoline can and found some duct tape to hold the cooler closed. Obviously, we didn’t know if that would be enough to keep Eve contained, so we brought the cooler with us as we headed to the spot where Lou had deflated. There was now no sign of the man himself. All that remained was the pile of eggs, dozens of them. John uncapped the gas can.

Amy said, “Kick them into a pile. And don’t let the fire spread. Everything is pretty dry out here.”

“Don’t you worry,” said John as he soaked the eggs. “Fire and I are old lovers. You treat her with respect, give her room to breathe, and everything will be juuuuust fine.”

*   *   *

Four hours later, we watched from afar as the city mobilized to put out the massive forest fire we’d started. The three of us were in the van, Amy and John up front, me in the back, perched on top of the cooler. The parasite had gone quiet a while ago. Maybe it had suffocated?

John was now leaning out of the driver’s-side window, talking to a cop.

“Everybody saw you go into the woods,” said the policeman. “A minute later, it’s going up like the devil’s shithouse. Were you shootin’ flaming bags of flour back there?”

“You wanna know the truth?” asked John. I leaned forward a little, actually eager to hear what he told the guy. “That dude you dropped off at Dave’s place? The guy having the hallucinations? He asks us to take him with us to the fireworks, then he goes back to the woods. One thing led to another, and we had to deal with him with gasoline and a lighter. It could have gone way worse than it did.”

“What guy?”

“Lou something? Went nuts at Loew’s? I don’t know who dropped him off at our place, but somebody did.”

“Loew’s shut down two weeks ago. Nobody took anybody to your house. Why would we even do that?”

“He said you’d dropped him off.”

“Did you see a squad car?”

“No, but he had to get there somehow. Unless . . .”